Moderator: Falconer
) but the the straight out of the players handbook stuff is an anomaly almost as if you were playing a Vulcan whose people crash landed in the campaign world. Not that there is any shortage of anything in my "maximalist" campaign! Don't make any mistake here. Minimalists run from my table! 
So it's not because they are so cool that way, but because you don't like them, but allow them anyways?geneweigel wrote:I was saying theres gnomes all over the place big gnomes, wee gnomes, elemental gnomes, blue gnomes called "schlumpfes" etc (Just kidding on the latter!
Right now I don't have to deal with this, I have been playing AD&D for just a year now (played nothing for ten years before, and ten years approx 2ed before that), so to me now everything is shiny and interesting! 
I Like this!rogatny wrote:I tend to pattern my gnomes after Rumpelstiltskin.
Kender halflings must die. Hobbit halflings are o.k., but I'd never want to play one.
I overdosed on elves back in the '90s.
Half-elves serve no purpose.
I like my dwarves Norse and crafty. I don't understand where the whole Scottish dwarf thing came from.
I like my half-orcs passable for humans, more like the swarthy, squinty-eyed chaps from Bree and not the man-monsters they've become in subsequent editions.
I prefer to play humans.
My paladins are more like Captain America and less like members of the S.S.
My clerics are crypto-Christians.
My druids are a mysterious cabal of nature cultists and not tree-huggers.
My rangers are defenders of civilization's borders and not tree-huggers.
My thieves steal stuff and aren't scouts. If you tell him to go ahead to scout, he's going to go ahead a little ways, hide in the shadows until you pass him, and then he'll creep up behind you and stab you in the back. There is, after all, "No honor among thieves." Now, if you let him creep around and steal stuff from other people, he'll have no cause to steal from you.
Bards aren't prissy minstrels. They're Norse/Celtic/bad-ass battle leaders and lore masters.
I think that pretty well covers it.
Players can imagine and play their PCs however they like. Just as long as they don't shove it down everyones throat, and even if they try, its not like the other players have to take it.Falconer wrote:Does the DM have 100% power to enforce his tastes in this area, though? I mean, to some degree when you sit down to play AD&D, it starts to piss the players off if the one thing they have some control over (PC race/class choice, assuming they roll for it fairly) is “railroaded”, right? Adding more classes and races than what is in the PHB is always a plus for the players (they don’t have to take them), but taking options away is more dicey.
IMO, a good rule of thumb is that your house rules have to be summarized simply. Most of rogatny’s list is nuance rather than strict disallowances, so that’s okay. I remember the first time I sat down at thedungeondelver’s game, he said, “you can be anything except the two Blackmoor classes”, which is more like what I’m talking about. Right now, my list of allowed options would probably be: “Humans of any PHB class, Hobbit Fighters, Dwarf Fighters, and Elf Fighter/Magic-Users.”
stranger wrote:I should mention that I am fine with an NPC minstral filling the gap left by removing the music from the Bard class.
